A couple weeks ago I was talking to Dave "SugeDog" Watson (I just gave you that nick name, Dave ^^) about the angst-ridden world of case-sensitive vs. case-insensitive file systems. People obciously have different opinions, and each side is adamant enough (and given the rather costly migration path) that I don't think one should hold their breath in the hopes that it'll converge anytime soon. So, the fun begins when file systems with different opinions are forced to play nice with one other. *SMIRK*

Now, if I were to introduce a samba share to the windows and macOS X users while allowing fellow Linux users to gain access to the same directory, and I wanted to prevent everyone from engaging in nightly rituals that involve torturing a voodoo doll with my face on it, what should the ideal conditions by which files are treated under that directory be? So we quickly conducted the following test.

1. created a directory called /mnt/samba/sane_dir under Linux
2. created a.txt and A.txt.
3. a.txt had "dog" as content, and A.txt had "cat".
4. mounted the directory using samba and connected to the share from windows
5. low and behold, we saw two files a.txt and A.txt
6. SugeDog and Slim murmured "That seems right..."
7. double clicked on a.txt
8. notepad sprung to life and prominently displayed "dog"
9. SugeDog and Slim nodded in contentment
10. went back to the opened share and now double clicked on A.txt
11. Holy mother of axe murderers!!! Somebody had taken my cat and replaced it with a dog!

Now, to be fair, we could have tweakd the samba config so that it would have been case-sensitive. However, the default setting is set to be case-insensitive, and the idea of something happening by default, is a rather important factor in the book of a person who wishes things would just work out of the box. ;)

So the moral of the story, for me at least, is that if it is, from the get go, fully intended that the directory is going to be used primarily as a samba share, then the directory sohould stick to being case-insensitive and prevent the creation of files that have the same case-insensitive name. This way, the majority of the user base of the directory will be pevented from being faced with the above fiasco. Of course, linux users who access the directory "locally" may be annoyed at this policy, but it's the only way I believe will prevent things from getting out of wack.

What do you guys gather?